This blog covers everything except sports and gardening, unless we find a really good link about using dead professional bowlers for mulch. The author is a StarTribune columnist, has been passing off fiction and hyperbole as insight since 1997, has run his own website since the Jurassic era of AOL, and was online when today’s college sophomores were a year away from being born. So get off his lawn.

Bygone Signage: the Movie Theater

Another detail from the vast resources of the 1960 Survey project - soon to be a big web project coming to a browser near you. Today it's Hennepin and Seventh:

The three-story building no longer stands. The theater is the RKO-Pan, with "Pan" standing for Pantages, its original name.

Cheerful, eh? Vice for vice! Kill for Kill! The Purple Gang was a bootlegging outfit, supposedly named because they were rotten, "purple like the color of bad meat." A movie called "The Bad Meat Gang" probably wouldn't have drawn many patrons.

The Pantages theater was built in 1916, bought by the RKO chain in '46 and modernized; it closed the year this picture was taken. In 1961 it was modernized again, and turned into the Mann. Its full glory was restored a few years ago - much more here.

This may look familiar to music lovers:

Music City held down the corner for a few decades, with a great effervescent sign; towards the end, I recall, they stopped replacing the light bulbs.

Then there's this:

Pan Fruit. Downtown had grocery stores back then, including the Great Northern up the street. A fella could buy an apple, wander into the show, and crunch it loudly to the dismay of fellow patrons.